Good Lord!!! 
good luck, rh…You’re in my thoughts!
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I talked to my brother today in Abita Springs, LA, and he still was without electricty from Gustav. I got the opinion that Gustav kind of fizzled out when it hit land west of New Orleans, however my brother said that the storm did a lot of damage in Baton Rouge, the state capitol. My nephew is a senior at LSU, and he said that many of the 200 year-old live oak trees on campus were blown down. The universty is not open for classes this week, but students are getting three free meals a day on campus. Because many traffic light are not working in the city, all intersections without working lights are supposed to be four-way stops, but you really have to be vigilant, my nephew said, as some people don’t want to stop and continue with their regular driving habits.
As for the other hurricanes that are a threat to the USA, all I can say is that I will be holding all people and other forms of life in my thoughts of safety. May everyone get through this storm season with the minimum amount of disruption and harm.
This is one of the problems with Katrina, a hurricane can knock the hell out of a region, and if it’s not as bad as Katrina, it’s going to be, you know, “not so bad,” and the press will pack up and leave and the charity contributions will be poor. It’s also an inevitable problem with the 1-5 scale. Oh, it’s just a Category 2, no big deal. IT’S A HURRICANE!!
Oh, man. Are you heading out?
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I’m scheduled, thanks to my boss Uncle Sam, to be flying in to Miami for a meeting in the Intercontinental Hotel on Monday. Luckily, the hotel is right on the beach.
I’m rather hoping they decide to reschedule this thing…
Eric
rh, what’s thet thar fern script in yer monicker say? 
djm
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It’s not fatalism, it’s just a case of there not being anywhere to go. As has been pointed out, people in the mid-west HAVE cellars. People in the south do not. You can’t run to a cellar you don’t have. Until very recently–Hurricane Andrew in the early 90’s–no effort was made to build things like “safe rooms” in homes because nobody really believed we had a tornado problem. Now they’re available, I’ve heard, but they’re expensive.
When I was a child, schools taught what to do in case of a tornado. Nobody had any clue what a cellar was. Lying down in a ravine was mystifying, because it’s flat here–there are no ravines. The only possibility would be a ditch, and those were invariably full of water. You’d drown. Today, you wouldn’t even have a ditch.
More recent educational campaigns have succeeded in communicating that one should take shelter in a small, interior room. The bathtub is about as reinforced as you can get here.
I imagine wool gets pretty heavy when wet …
djm
Agreed. No one builds basements here. It’s very hard to find a house with
one even if you want one (and with our red clay drainage, you don’t want
one!). When tornado warnings came along, my mother made us sit in a
closet in the middle of the house. Better than nothing, I guess.
It really was no miracle. What happened was just this:
The wind began to switch, the house to pitch and suddenly the hinges started to unhitch.
Just then the Witch - to satisfy an itch - went flying on her broomstick, thumbing for a hitch.
djm
That’s the best exclaimation I’ve heard in a long while. May I use it?
I have a friend who’s going to Cape Cod this weekend. I wonder how that will work out?
Well, our conference was just postponed. This will likely mean that the hurrican will now miss Miami followed by days of lovely, sunny weather.
Eric
It does, but it still retains heat. Isn’t that nice? 
We just got the remains of Gustav today. Quite a disappointment was Gustav. Here’s hoping that Hanna, Ike and Josephine provide a little more sizzle. 
djm
good thing too…
in Florida?
That isn’t funny; it’s sick!